ChatOps is a term often credited to GitHub, and it is all about putting the tools in the middle of the conversations. At Unacast, most of our conversations go through Slack. When we integrated ChatOps into our workflow, we got the tools closer to the conversation. We are using a version of GitHub Flow for our development process. That means all new features goes in a branch, someone opens a pull request and we merge continuously from master into the feature branch. When we have something that is ready to deploy to a server we trigger a deploy of the branch to a test environment. When the new feature gets verified it gets deployed to production, gets verified again, and then merged back into master. This workflow enables us to maintain a clean master branch so we can roll back in case something fails. Sched Link: http://sched.co/67c1

2. BACKING PROXIMITY
ChatOps and Automatic Deployment on k8s
Andreas Heim, Lead Platform Engineer
andreas.heim@unacast.com
@heim
@unacast

3. “Unacast is one of
the top 10 global
companies in the
3,5$ billion retail
analytics industry”
“Unacast: The
Prototype for the
New Advertising
Generation”
Winner of “Best new
Nordic company”
BACKING PROXIMITY
The #1 platform connecting customers’ physical behaviour from
beacons and other sensors to online marketing platforms
Offices in Oslo, NYC, London and San Francisco
PROX Retargeting
network: 46+
partners
Currently
1 000 000 sensors
connected
to the
network
Proxbook directory:
285
members

4. Why does Unacast
Exist?

5. BACKING PROXIMITY
The World is Being
Sensored Up!
Source: Proxbook Q4 Report www.proxbook.com

6. BACKING PROXIMITY

7. Push notifications:
In-store experience and
increased basket size
The traditional
approach
Added opportunities
with PROX
Retargeting:
Leverage proximity data,
get customers back to
store
BACKING PROXIMITY

9. BACKING PROXIMITY

10. App Engine
Datastore
Pub/Sub
Dataflow
BigQuery
Container Engine
Dataflow

11. dev == prod

12. ChatOps??!?11

14. • Copy the files from your computer to production fileshare
• Send a jar to the sysadmin
• Run a deploy-script from your local computer
• Git push to production
• Use Jenkins or a custom UI to do deployments
• ChatOps

15. Send jar via
email
Local script
git push to
production
Central UI
ChatOps
Repeatable Transparent
Arena for
discussion

16. soft pipeline

23. But hey, k8s what?

24. Deploy scripts
• Check that dependencies are in present
• Creating a Replication Controller if none exist
• Updating the Replication Controller if exists
• Performing rolling update

25. Heaven passes info to our scripts
• Branch
• Sha
• Environment

27. https://gist.github.com/heim/3881e4c62a01f17255f9

28. Caveats
• None

29. Future plans
• Shorten container build time
• Automated canary releases
• Manage infrastructure
• Deployment API

30. Emerging patterns
• nginx-ssl-proxies
• certificates in secrets
• discovery by dns
• environment discovery
• one cluster per environment
• building containers == slow

31. Where to start
• Start with monitoring
• Make stable deploy scripts that do not require a lot of
parameters
• Test locally first
• Slowly does it
• Avoid channel spamming

32. http://labs.unacast.com/

37. We are hiring
http://thetwenty.jobs